Free online proxy: who pays for it, and what with

Printed prices, verified

The three funding models, and what each costs you

1. Advertising injected into your pages. The visible model, and the least troubling. The proxy inserts its own advertising into the pages it rewrites for you, which is intrusive and honest in roughly equal measure.
2. Logging and selling browsing data. Invisible from the outside. The proxy already sees every address you request, so recording and selling that is a change of policy rather than of capability.
3. Reselling your connection as an exit. The most serious. Some free products have used their users' connections as exit points for other people's traffic, which means activity you know nothing about appearing to come from your address.
4. None of the three is usually disclosed. Which is the actual complaint. A paid service publishes a price and a policy; a free proxy list publishes neither, so there is nothing to read.

The accountable free option, which is a different product

Three providers in this price index publish a free plan on their own domain with the limits stated: hide.me lists restricted speeds, eight locations and one connection; Windscribe publishes a build-a-plan tier starting at zero; Proton VPN maintains a dedicated free page.

Those are limited versions of a paid product, funded by the paid product, from companies with a published policy and a support address. The limits are real and they are written down, which is the whole difference.

When free stops being the right question

If the requirement is ongoing, covers more than one browser, or involves anything you would not paste into a public forum, the question changes from which free proxy to which accountable service and at what price.

This index answers the second: what each provider prints, what term that price requires and what it renews at, quoted from their own pages and dated. The renewal is the number the free market has no equivalent of and the paid market prints in the smallest type.

Common questions

Is a free online proxy safe?

The operator sees everything you request and most disclose nothing about funding or retention. Treat anything you type into one as visible to a stranger.

Why are free proxies so slow?

They are heavily shared and often rate-limited, and the popular ones are already blocked by the services people want to reach.

Is a free VPN tier safer than a free proxy?

It is at least accountable: the limits and the policy are published on the provider's own site, beside the paid plan that funds it.

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